How to kill the university | Hacker News Reader

How to kill the university

thesephist.com

35 pointscaminocorner60 comments

Oh, it is easy, the US is trying it right now. Inflate the administration body, filling the University with a majority of career bureaucrats who contribute nothing to research, teaching or learning. Then inflate tuitions to unaffordable levels so you can pay for the bureaucrats. Next, drop merit requirements for both students and professors and replace them with identity based selection criteria. Finally, protects students, all of them and at all costs, from any idea that any of them might find unsettling.

You forgot: have grad students do most of the teaching/grading and pay them pennies on the dollar.

Ah yes, this is particularly effective in CS where students are giving up extraordinarily high salaries for the privilege of teaching undergrads.

Aren’t a lot of these grad students internationals? It’s immigration laws and culture that drive them into grad school, not the privilege of teaching undergrads.

Loads and loads of parents of international students push their kids into grad school because they want them to climb the ladder to the upper echelon. They don’t know how to accomplish this in the corporate world because that ladder is more like a maze of culture fit dead ends. Then it’s the immigration laws which make this path extremely risky (getting fired and losing your visa, then having to go home).

So the focus is on school, which they already know how to do well at. As long as you stay in academia, you can safely maintain a student visa. It’s your foot in the door. And then when you graduate with an advanced degree you’re much better positioned to get a long term visa leading to a green card.

I was one of those international students. It was 50/50 Americans/Internationals when I went to grad school 20 years ago, I am not sure if that has changed. Perhaps for some of the internationals you reasoning applied, though it did not to me, but for the Americans I think only an extreme love of research would keep you in grad school, when you can make 10x more money elsewhere, working fewer hours, under less pressure.

Strikes me as overblown, because that's a criticism universities and bureaucracies have always faced. They're insular, they select based on their own criteria, they're too slow, and yet they outlast almost anything else. During their hundreds of years of existence many bureaucracies have up and downs, yet they're resilient.

If you ask me if Oxford will be around longer than any currently listed company on the S&P 500 I'm actually pretty confident to say, yep it will. You might as well also have described the Catholic Church in your post, but the Vatican is still kicking.

> You might as well also have described the Catholic Church in your post, but the Vatican is still kicking.

The church used to play a vastly more important role in society than it does today… something for universities to ponder now that repositories of knowledge and communities that formed around such are no longer bound behind their walls and the churches walls before that…

That's an impressive list of tired clichés. You did, however, forget to complain about the humanities ("Oh, the humanities!").

You did mention "identity based criteria", which is, indeed, a terrible scourge of the modern universities, as compared to the days of yore (i. e. until the 70s or 80s, or, as they are sometimes called, "the first 560 years of the modern university"), where everyone, including women, non-white people, and everyone not born to the richest 5% were famously admitted on exactly the same criteria as real people. But it doesn't count unless you also crack a joke about Judith Butler or Hannah Arendt.

>Inflate the administration body, filling the University with a majority of career bureaucrats who contribute nothing to research, teaching or learning. Then inflate tuitions to unaffordable levels so you can pay for the bureaucrats. Next, drop merit requirements for (-both-) students

All of this is correct.

If you're refuting this, you either don't pay attention to anything, are some old fudder who went to uni 35+ years ago, or are living in a gigantically blown bubble.

> If you're refuting this, you either don't pay attention to anything, are some old fudder who went to uni 35+ years ago, or are living in a gigantically blown bubble.

I haven't paid attention to the latest fads, but when I went to Uni 35+ years ago, "gigantically blown" bubbles were regarded to be superior to small bubbles, as far as intellectual universes are concerned.

These complaints don't really address the point of this article. Career bureaucrats? An integral part of the supercommunity, dealing with the paperwork that their class set up themselves and getting doled out a cut of all the money rolling in for "education" and "research". Unconnected and politically unsavvy undergrads dealing with tuition inflation are losers in this situation, true, but those who are willing to work the system can still get rewarded. And besides, when I think about the cost of my state school, there's no way I could have that much fun at my age for so little money.

The library still contains plenty of unsettling ideas, and you're missing the system's neatest trick: they still have so much money and prestige that they can simply co-opt any serious competitors. I'd bet money that the author of this post would take a professorship and a budget at a prestigious university any day if it were offered, as long as they get weakly promised some kind of independence, the same kind of independence a tobacco-sponsored scientist gets.

I know. I only skimmed the article, but the title was too good to pass on.

Which industries have not been overwhelmed by skyrocketing administrative overhead?

It sounds like you have not been in an R1 university (ever?) and are pulling your critiques out of a hat after listening to right-of-center podcasts like the Rubin report. I would love to hear about a _single_ R1 university that is hiring based on identity criteria, where the majority of the staff are "career bureaucrats who contribute nothing to research". The way you get grant money is by doing research that gets published at top-tier conferences, and at least in CS it is pretty hard to bullshit your way into those. Try not to make authoritative sounding posts like this without any knowledge of what you are talking about.

Respectfully, I think you're basing this assessment on what it was like when you or I went to college and haven't kept up with recent trends. If you apply to most R1 faculties today, you'll be required to write what's known as a "diversity statement", a detailed explanation of what you've done for underrepresented identity groups and how you intend to help them in the future. And the UC headcount stats (https://www.universityofcalifornia.edu/infocenter/uc-employe...) show 11,559 tenure-track faculty vs. about 16,500 "managers and senior professionals" - I don't quite agree with the tone of the original claim, but I think it's fair to say that means there's more bureaucrats than researchers.

I recently applied to the faculty job market and wrote a diversity statement. I have also served on the hiring end (last year), and have heard enough to understand that the content in this statement will neither make nor break your case, but is an additional datapoint that the committee takes into consideration.

I hope the OP understands I was being mostly sarcastic, but really they wrote a (imo) uninformed post about the university life which is far from the reality at the research-oriented institutions I've passed through in the past 10 years.

Thanks for the additional datapoint. Speaking seriously, I am on the same page about bloat and there is a very real danger of it especially in the UC and other state school systems. Maybe private institutions are more robust to bloat since there is less protection for non-tenured employment. Generally the trend to hiring XM$/yr administrators as university heads is worrying, but I am not sure what the fix for it is in the endless competition for endowment and donor money.

Last edit: check out "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber if you haven't already. You may not agree with his politics or his prescriptions, but the book is a funny and highly alarming wakeup call to the proliferation of useless jobs (part of the book discusses bloat in university administrations).

Oh yeah, I've heard about that book before! I keep putting it off, maybe this time I'll actually read it over the holidays.

I have a graduate degree from an R1 University. Perhaps you should back off a little on the personal attacks and substantiate your rebuttal with more than insults. My point was on the overall US University system, not R1 Universities , not that it matters all that much.

For R1, on administrative bloat:

https://oir.harvard.edu/fact-book/faculty_and_staff

https://web.mit.edu/facts/faculty.html

In both you can see that there are more people in the Administrative staff than in the faculty. As to discrimination based admission, Harvard and Yale were sued for that, I am sure you know about it. As for discrimination in hiring, here is a Cornell study :

https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/04/women-preferred-21-...

Thanks for the datapoints and level-headed reply, and apologies for the snark.

I didn't know about the Cornell study, although I am not at all surprised to hear that. How do you suggest representation imbalance in CS faculty gets somewhat closer to 50/50 without having some kind of bias towards hiring women, though? As someone of Asian descent, I totally understand where the lawsuits against Harvard/Yale were coming from, but at the same time I see no way to fix representation in undergrad/grad-school/faculty outside of some kind of "discriminative" hiring procedures (outside of fixing much broader and challenging systemic issues).

I think the problem is this belief that there is something to fix at all. It goes without saying that there should be no barriers to anyone doing anything they want, but we have that already. Why is 50/50 in CS a goal at all? Who cares? Do we also want 50/50 in nursing? on oil rigs? or in prison? Why? Seriously, WTF? Are we so stupid that we discount millions of years of evolution and chalk any difference in outcome to cultural norms? It is all so, so stupid, and we all know it.

I agree that in principle anyone can do what they want, and I hope that in our long term our society can actually realize this ideal, but in practice an individual's decisions are informed by the mores and attitudes of the culture they find themselves in. So the conflating factor is our society's history of discouraging women from pursuing technical paths, the (older) insistence that they be homemakers and take on more traditionally feminine roles (like K-12 teachers). Yes, we no longer overtly say such things, but the effects of these attitudes persist across large subpopulations and ethnic groups. It seems very likely to me that traditional gender roles and attitudes about what jobs a women is capable of doing has caused fewer women to pursue math/physics (e.g., see the statistics here: https://math.mit.edu/wim/2019/03/10/national-mathematics-sur...).

Also consider the very recent history of breakthrough results coming from female mathematicians like Lisa Piccirillo and Urmila Mahadev. How much human potential are we leaving on the table, untapped?

I see no "easy fix" for improving representation in higher education other than affirmative action. It's one of the few knobs that we have to turn without much more significant changes to society like implementing UBI or making the average work week much shorter. While it may hurt people like me who happen to be well represented, and prevent me from joining the institution "I deserve" to be in, well maybe that's better for society in the long run.

We all know how valuable network effects are in staving off competition, and universities are an excellent example of that. If you don't like dem apples, you can get a great education at the library and online for free, but education isn't the only (and possibly not even the primary) benefit of the university - it's the resources and connections that surround it.

The other big thing universities have going for them is status signaling - I went to Stanford, and because of that, my resume will get looked at/people will listen when I open my mouth/etc. Whether or not that's good is a separate question, but it's true. If you get an education of equivalent value at a place nobody's ever heard of, you don't get those benefits. As the number of resumes/people speaking/etc. goes up, the ability to quickly filter becomes more important, and thus my Stanford degree has more value.

This sounds right but how relevant do you think it is several years after graduating?

Probably still important, in the sense that a head start is a head start. If a Stanford graduate goes to Google after senior year, their whole career is likely to look a lot different. Steps lead to other steps.

Much less - then you get to the same brand name effect but for companies you've worked at. Though those brand names probably correlate a lot more heavily to real employment value.

A lot less for sure. I've met many top 10 university graduates who are 30+ and have nothing to show for it with little respect in their domains and mediocre job prospects. It certainly is a massive help in the early 20s though.

I’d argue it’s the credential even more than the connections. The connections are extremely valuable but I imagine in a number of fields you can have an impressive network and be very knowledgeable but will never break in without the credentials.

I don't think it's the ability to quickly filter that's the issue, it's the morality of it and/or the long-term costs of doing so.

This is why the discussion of meritocracy is so prominent in the last several years, along with a rise in populism.

The ability to filter isn't the issue, it's what keeps the system in place. Not saying it's a good thing, just that it's the reality of the situation and a reason so many attempts to get rid of the existing university system fall flat.

There is one thing that my friend's father said to me once, about these analogies between universities and businesses. A typical business lasts in the order of 20-30 years, a couple of generations if lucky. Most famous universities have lasted centuries. And these is the western university system, starting with Bologna, Paris and Oxford after 1000 AD. If you expand the definition of a university slightly broader, you find the famous universities of Sankore, Baghdad, around 800 AD (the syllabus included Aristotle and Euclid), and even before that, Nalanda and Taxila from around 300 BC-1000 AD, and Alexandria from the Egyptian times.

A university is a slow moving, lumbering beast. But analyses like these are too shallow to understand why it has lasted so long, and why every place that was once a centre of human civilisation also had a great university.

Agree, there is a lot to unpack around universities. I definitely don’t think they are beyond criticism. That being said they are one of the only non-conditional long term organizations one can be associated with as an adult(alumni).

Nicely put. The title might be intentionally clickbaity, but it’s should strongly remind us of Chesterton’s fence.

I can imagine many alternatives that might appear better than universities in today’s world with contemporary assumptions, but it is totally unclear whether any of them (especially VC-funded startups) might survive over significant timescales (minimum one century) — protecting human knowledge and hosting a fecund environment for the human intellect. Universities are conservative almost by design (and I don’t mean politics), and that’s what has helped them survive so long in symbiosis with increasing knowledge and changing social mores. Historically, they have been very good at adapting (slowly), unlike modern businesses which are so rigid that their trajectory typically involves getting killed/consumed by an upstart in a matter of decades. To the extent that universities have serious problems, a lot of can be traced to trying to run them like businesses.

Wow, I've never thought about it this way. This article and comment have almost completely changed the way I think about universities. I really enjoy the idea that universities are culture engines, I think that is true in so many ways.

This. Several years ago, I sat through a panel (at a university) in which representatives from various businesses tried to lecture a bunch of academics about how the university is a hidebound institution, and that if doesn't "get with the times" it will be crushed by the new technological world order.

I recall noting that "the university" had not only outlasted any particular firm they could name, but had indeed survived the rise and fall of empires. I also noted the irony of being lectured by a representative from Big Blue about one's inability to "pivot."

"The university" is a remarkably resilient institution. That doesn't make it a good institution, but we should pause before we analyze them with the kind of narrow-minded presentism we see in this post. Universities have survived these many centuries not because they refuse to change, but because they're better at changing than even the nation states that have supported them.

I think it's important to note that many institutions have technically persisted and adapted without really staying competitive. Catholic monasteries, for example, have almost none of the respect and power they used to enjoy. I have no doubt universities will still exist centuries from now - but will they exist as dynamic centers of intellect, or archaic live-in social clubs?

> I think it's important to note that many institutions have technically persisted and adapted without really staying competitive.

This will go ignored by most, for they are too caught up in the respect and power they enjoy now from their associations (or those they hope to gain by joining such ranks) to not realize that its slowly seeping away at best, and not strictly to individual states or corporate institutions, and that full "handover" of power is a slow process that can span generations with occasional jumps within any given one.

It's resources are being siphoned to build anew, like the church's before it.

You are right, the past may not indicate the future. In any case, mass higher education is a new thing, probably only from the late 19th century. It may also happen that the scale of university education will go down, while universities survive.

> The reinvention of the university is inevitable, but a long road stretches ahead

Nothing lasts forever, but Oxford and Bologna have been around a while.

Perhaps one should ask: how can we create an educational (or other) institution which will last for 1000 years?

> Nothing lasts forever, but Oxford and Bologna have been around a while.

Neither Oxford nor Bologna would be recognizable as universities when they started out. They became universities many years after the initial founding/charter, but they didn't start out as universities.

> Perhaps one should ask: how can we create an educational (or other) institution which will last for 1000 years?

By allowing the institutions to adapt, grow and change with the times. Or maybe in certain instances, it's simply better to shut things down and start anew.

Yep. The last thing we need is to destroy more major institutions. Try breathing new life into them instead.

We've had enough of the disrupters.

> Perhaps one should ask: how can we create an educational (or other) institution which will last for 1000 years?

What would be the reasons for doing so? (As opposed to simply allowing creative destruction to have its way.)

How important is education? I think its incredibly important that we prevent more dark ages in the future, and preserving knowledge through universities is as far as we know the most sustainable way to keep education alive

Productive engines as they are, universities are flawed. They’re expensive, inefficient bureaucracies that are often inequitable. I have confidence universities can be disrupted, and new, stronger ideas will take their place in society in due time – the imperfections are too fatal in the long term to brush away. There is no shortage of interesting companies and experimental policies trying to find alternatives to universities as a product. But whatever takes the place of universities will also have to fill the role they currently play to the communities that grow around and beyond it, into the rest of the world. And fortunately to those who manage to reinvent this community engine, with a strong and growing community by your side, building great products become much less risky.

People also mean tons of different things, some very tenuously related, when they talk about "universities." Even among students at a given university, goals/desires may differ enormously: https://jakeseliger.com/2014/04/27/paying-for-the-party-eliz....

The "elite" university (which means it has fairly competitive entrance criteria) only consists of a couple hundred schools. They'll likely be fine, and they're also likely the entrepreneurial hotbeds the author references. It's all the other schools where we might see the greatest transformations, particularly in the short and medium terms.

Another challenge "the next university" faces is the subsidies the current university system gets right now. Whatever might replace the current system will either need to tap those subsidies itself or be so good that it can compete with the current crop of subsidies.

So, it is interesting (from a U.S. perspective, anyway) that such a post does not appear to mention "student loan" even once. There is a saying that "things that cannot go on forever, won't".

I think the university (and ancillary) community, whether they say it out loud or not, more or less assumes that the government will pick up the tab when the student loan financial bubble pops. But, while that may in some sense happen, it will bring with it some manner of major change to how universities work, and which ones survive.

I work for a university, both as a teacher and as an internal employee, I also studied at the same university. It's not unusual for staff to have studied at the uni and many of my professional colleagues guest lecture, though I am the only tutor as far as I know. (Australian uni, so words may have different meanings to American's). Prior to joining the uni I was a big4 consultant and general know it all :D

Anyway, as a strategy consultant I often ask myself what would we do differently if we were starting higher education from scratch. Every country I've looked at has a slightly different take on tertiary education and my own ideas are clearly biased by the Australian experience.

In Australia we usually have to pick our major before we finish high school. There is, as far as I know, nothing comparable to the US 2-4 year degree that is basically a choose your own adventure (I could joke about Arts degrees, but sadly not enough people do them and even then my story below holds true). This puts a lot of pressure on people to pick the "right" degree to support their career goals, often before they know what their career will be. (Heck I'm almost 40 and still trying to figure it out). However another side effect of this is you end up in an echo chamber of classes with other like minded students studying basically the same things, and you rarely get the wider experience outside of your major.

Example: I start a degree in Computer Science, in most of my classes all my peers are also CS students, and while sometimes there will be a few randoms who pick a subject for complimentary skills (Maths students studying programming so they can get better at R; economics students, same reason) these students aren't as 'good' as the CS students so no one wants to group with them, and they don't sit in any of the existing cliques.

Ultimately this leaves a lot of people with a very limited network of people after uni. The CS majors don't have the contacts they need from the Business school or the Law school to be able to find opportunities for new ventures, or to recommend them into other opportunities and vice versa.

So I think I'd start by looking at how we can encourage the development of these communities further. For now I give most of my mentees a copy of Never Eat Alone and hope they read it and take it to heart.

I think University of Melbourne is much closer to the 2-4 year degree. This is a 3 year undergrad with a 2 year masters. I went this route and I am glad I did.

Initially, I wanted to do mechatronics engineering but I wasn't entirely sure so I did a Bachelor of Science at UoM, I did some mechanical eng subjects and kind of realized that I hated the math there so I switched into comp sci.

Now I am specializing my masters in distributed computing. It's really worked out well for me, I have a solid understanding of math thanks to my engineering background and math subjects that I did, this has been very helpful for the theoretical comp sci subjects that I am undertaking.

I remember UoM announcing it but a quick look at the website didn't show any details. I would have loved that kind of opportunity when I was an undergrad.

> In Australia we usually have to pick our major before we finish high school.

On paper. In practice, it's not very hard to begin one degree but then switch to another.

> I start a degree in Computer Science, in most of my classes all my peers are also CS students

It depends. In our CS degree, you stand a very good chance of meeting (at least virtually) students from other disciplines, degrees, and backgrounds in some subject - from the statistics, not just in mathematics classes but also in Python classes and anything that looks like data science. It does depend on how your degree and how their degree was designed, however - some disciplines prescribe the entire programme while others make more space for including subjects from other fields.

Supply vs demand, universities can charge ridiculous tuitions because they are in demand more than ever. Yes the governments have made it so you cannot bankrupt the tuition debt, but it doesn't mean you need to take on that debt to beginwith.

Will bureaucracy and identity politics kill the universities? No they wont die, they will simply be of lower quality. What makes a university better than another? The quality of the education fundamentally. If they don't hire based on merit, the quality of the education drops.

Even if they drop to diploma mill quality, they wont die.

What will kill universities is if they get replaced. The "community" derives out of quality education. If you went to a university which gives away diplomas to anyone, then opened a business. You wont want to hire from that pool of applicants. Look at Elon Musk's hatred of university degrees and especially MBAs.

It is worth noting, for context, that Linus post lists 'West Lafayette, IN' as the location...home to Purdue University, and headed by Mitch Daniels of

'Black Scholars are a rare creature' [0], Profits over meaningful innovation [1], and War in Iraq will cost $50b [2]

[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2019/12/05/purdue-p...

[1] https://www.jconline.com/story/news/opinion/2019/08/29/purdu...

[2] https://www.newyorker.com/news/george-packer/mitch-danielss-...

Astute observation :) but not sure how relevant of a piece of context as I don't study there. I've done some stuff on Purdue campus but I attend UC Berkeley which is an institution with its own set of strengths and challenges.

This is a little like asking "how to kill the school", "how to kill the hospital", "how to kill the fire brigade".

Universities are defined by national legislation and regulation and are (in most countries) largely government supported, even where there are student fees (underwritten by government-backed loans). Most of those same governments are aware that these institutions are keystone employers in their cities and have very deep links into the economy, to the point that they often co-invest in new campuses.

Articles like these tend to get written by computer scientists who think "but people can study from anywhere so surely you can set up a university from your bedroom" who haven't looked at the stats and seen that a sizeable proportion of student degrees (education, nursing, medicine, etc) are ones in which the government also regulates the jobs you get afterwards.

Private providers have a stigma of being incredibly suspect because of dodgy practices that have been engaged in in the past. Such as offering potential students gifts (e.g. free laptops) to enrol in courses they are not in a position to study so that the provider can collect the government contribution towards student fees. The upshot of which is that if you're a university, you get to be "self-accrediting" (for the sake of academic freedom and because practically the government can beat you with a stick any time you do the wrong thing because not only do they control your funding, they also directly appoint several members of your governing council) whereas if you are a private provider, you are at much greater regulatory risk because another private provider could do something dodgy causing new regulations to come in hampering your business.

There are certainly many interesting and profitable businesses to run in the higher education space, but if your goal is to "kill the university" you're almost certainly doomed before you've started, because you are not playing in a free market; you are playing in the proportion of the market the government of the day chooses to make open to private competition. Political realities are that is never going to be "all of it".

Caveat: posting from an Australian context, but though the mechanisms are different, around the world the situation appears to be similar. Higher education is not run as a free market, has tight regulations, and significant government investment.

Using a throwaway here since every time since every time I've asked this people seem to get really offended at the thought of it...

But was my class really the only ones that hated every single moment of their post secondary education? Granted we were a small graduating class, only 15, and it just some back water college, not a university. But our graduating ceremony was cancelled because literally none of us signed up for it. Most of us were just so sick of seeing that campus and everything about it. Even thinking about today makes me feel ill at ease.

Just seems as if everyone else I know seems to have some happy moment from those years. Never found anyone else that disliked their time in college and makes me wonder what made it so happy for others, and what was so different for my class specifically for us to hate it so. Only thing I can think of was that ours was the last class to be the last to be run through that specific program, but that's the only thing particularly unique about it AFAIK.

> Only thing I can think of was that ours was the last class to be the last to be run through that specific program, but that's the only thing particularly unique about it AFAIK.

Could be that it was worse because of that. Your experience sounds unusual, but bad college/program + bad luck is statistically going to happen sometimes somewhere. I.e. I know plenty of people that were truly unhappy with their programs and switched or dropped out. (To be clear, not to be interpreted as a fault of those people, it just doesn't work out for everyone, even in generally good places). I don't have particular difficulty imagining a college I couldn't stand at all either.

I hated almost everything about my college experience, particularly the idea that I was incentivized to waste time memorizing everything in order to come first.

I did enjoy the company of some of the best students in the cohort though, but I wouldn't like to repeat that experience.

Title should be "How to replace the university". Worried that this would be a political rant about the other side killing the university, and there are already several such rants in the comments here.

He never actually gets to his subject. He stops at the point of maximum return on clickbait.

Answer: taxpayer-funded online education instead of Wall Street-issued educational debt

We already have that. They're called universities...

(The majority of my students are online. The same is true for many other Australian universities outside the biggest cities.)

CA State Governor Reagan killed public universities in the USA. Death by a thousand cuts. Notable mortal wounds were Prop 13 and COVID-19.

Private universities, including the formerly public institutions able to amass sizable endowments, will be fine.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com